Mousy Mouse In The House

One dark morning about a week ago I heard a very loud rustling sound in our kitchen. I thought it was something outside the window, but when I turned on the light it stopped immediately.

That day we had to go out and leave Jasmine at home on her own for a while. When we got back she was unusually distraught and it took a couple of hours for her to settle down. We thought it odd, but didn't connect it with the sound I'd heard that morning.

The next day I found tiny droppings in a number of places in the living room. Tony sealed up all the possible entryways into the apartment through open electrical wiring socket holes. We closed off the kitchen and the living room overnight to see if the mouse was still visiting.

There were droppings in almost every room this time. He had chewed his way through the plastic we had placed under the doors. This was somewhat unfortunate because the place had just been fairly thoroughly cleaned. I wiped and swabbed all day long, and with each passing hour my respect for the critter grew. And my imagination about what he looked like and what he was capable of grew with it.It was a bit of a painful process to discover the extent to which a mouse could wreak havoc in our home, and so I didn't think before today to take photos to post. However, we did manage to catch our little mouse during the night in the kitchen and he turned out to be extremely cute.

We had seen him the day before through the kitchen glass door in broad daylight looking around. He appeared to be rather large, but when we saw him in the trap this morning he was super tiny.

As he became more relaxed in our presence he started to investigate his cage trap and we could see his ability to flex and extend his body is totally incredible. We're pretty sure that this is the same mouse after all. Just to be sure though, the kitchen is still closed up securely!We lured him into the cage trap using Jasmine's pellets as bait. We tried cheese and sweet yellow pepper and chocolate but these didn't entice him at all. You can see the chocolate here untouched, we had placed a pellet on top of the chocolate. We didn't have peanut butter, which apparently mice just love. It seems he had a taste for the pellets though.

He has a really long tail which is extremely flexible, like the rest of him.His ears are paper thin and very delicate. And they fold very neatly completely down against his head when he makes himself small and compact. And when he does that he also curls his tail right round himself and round his feet. Then he becomes so adorably cute.

He has the sweetest little black eyes.


You can see his back leg and the foot here. Everything about him appears to be elastic.






And here his hand is totally amazing.With the number of droppings this little critter left everywhere it would almost seem he had tummy trouble. Oops, of course, it may also have been a girl!Tony took him out to the fields (a long long way away from here) to a place where he would have protection from bad weather and access to good food in the field and left him a large number of Jazzy pellets to get him started. Hopefully he has a good and happy life - outside.